Peter Jones
James E. English Professor of Mathematics
Peter Jones, B.S. Brown University, Ph.D. UCLA, faculty member at Yale since 1985, after a career at the University of Chicago: You are a National Academy mathematician whose career has blended pure math with applied math across scientific disciplines.
Your work in geometric analysis, singular integrals, and fractal geometry has had an impact on several areas of mathematics. One of your most significant contributions is pioneering work on quasiconformal mappings, a field that deals with the geometry of shapes and their deformations. Your insights in this area have advanced our understanding of the geometric properties of mappings and have found applications in a wide range of mathematical disciplines, including complex analysis, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory.
Your work on singular integrals has also been revolutionary. Your insights into the behavior of singular integrals, which are mathematical objects that arise in the study of various physical phenomena, have led to important breakthroughs in harmonic analysis and related fields.
You have been a wonderful teacher, especially for many graduate students. Two of these, Andrea Nahmod and Paul MacManus, have written, “Peter was a wonderful teacher. He knew how to convey the essence of the material and his joy in the subject was contagious. He encouraged us to understand math as an adventure. As he liked to say about attending an advanced seminar, ‘Go, it’s like opera: you might not understand everything, but you’ll get the feeling’—and he was right!”
At Yale, you also have been a contributing citizen and a leader in establishing the applied mathematics program, for which you acted as director and provided consistent support in its development. You have also served as its Director of Graduate Studies, department chair, and interim chair.
At the start of your career in 1981, you won the Salem Prize, which recognizes exceptional work by young analysts, as well as a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1983. A decade later, you were awarded an honorary Doctor of Technology degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1998 you became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2007 you were elected a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and, again in the U.S., you were elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.
For your passion and enthusiasm for all branches of your field, your colleagues have named you a ”Prince of Mathematics”—and we wish you a royal retirement.